WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR., RIP

I mourn the death of Bill Buckley at age 82. It’s a great personal sorrow and knot in the throat, and here’s why. He did so much to form my thinking and worldview. Buckley’s writings were perhaps my formative historical and political education a half century ago and onwards until today. He was always the central well-informed voice I looked to. And now it’s gone. I mourn the death of a true inspirer and friend, one of the best journalists and debaters on policy issues of our age. Thanks to my literate parents and Mutual Network radio news commentator Fulton Lewis Jr., for whom my mother and I both worked, I was blessed growing up reading National Review magazine as a youth in the 1950s through seventies, eighties, nineties. Buckley’s death and loss of his tremendous gift to write and spread the message is a great personal sorrow for me and millions. He did so much to form our thinking and worldview – for me from age 15. My fortune was interning one summer as a high school student for radio commentator Fulton Lewis Jr., who liked my interest in American history and politics and loaded me up with copies of National Review magazine, then recently founded by Buckley and collaborator Brent Bozell, with rich columns by Russell Kirk and other greats of the American old conservative right. Lewis also loaded me up with issues of the biweekly conservative Human Events newspaper and review copies of books received by his column writer, Bill Schulz, ranging from Whittaker Chambers’ monumental “Witness” to John Chamberlain’s crisp book, “Enterprising Americans,” that told me all I needed to know about invention of electricity by Benjamin Franklin, the lightbulb by Thomas Edison, the automobile by Henry Ford. In one of his forty books Buckley told of sailing his yacht across the Atlantic so he could smoke marijuana without getting arrested. He was a totally honest man, admitted his frailties, always ran against government waste and authoritarianism, and was universally respected for his honesty, integrity, civility, manners, and intellectual ability to take on all comers. The man was the Geoffrey Chaucer or Ben Jonson of our age. Lewis gave me the book written by Buckley, “God and Man At Yale,” which set out a conservative political and social vision that had a great influence on me. This book also armed Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and had great influence on a zillion politically-interested people at the time it came out in the mid-fifties. Buckley was famous for skewering liberal-leftists. He got into a famous televised fist-fight with famed leftist homosexual New York author Gore Vidal, who he told on the air –- I was watching the show -- “Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, you queer, or I’ll sock you in your goddamned face, and you’ll stay plastered." Buckley took on liberal-lefists for many years on his weekly PBS television show, “Firing Line.” In one of his columns, my favorite 35 years ago, he took on a black college student named Rickie Ivie, who had called composer Johann Sebastian Bach “an old dead punk.” Buckley wrote a column in response to Ivie that resonated his anger about the juggernaut against our culture. He said to Ivie in the column that Bach “has done more to elevate the human spirit than all the black student unions born and unborn.” Boom. He knew how to decimate indolent fools and did so regularly. Buckley for more than a half-century was “the seminal definition of literate conservatism,” according to the Associated Press obituary. “A man of conviction but also of thought and reason, Buckley has championed the conservative cause and ideal through times of great support for his positions and times of great disgust over them. In the 60's he was for Goldwater. In the 80's he was for Reagan. “Through both, he was for conservative ideology and educated discussion. In the aftermath of the television program, ‘The Day After,’ in the famous discussion and debate where Carl Sagan said  the United States and the Soviet Union were both standing in gasoline, with one side holding three lit matches and the other five, Buckley who sat on the other side and discussed the needs for nuclear deterrence. It didn't matter if he was the only person in the building who believed it -- he did believe it, and he could rationally and intelligently lay out the reasons for it.” Buckley was a true libertarian conservative thinker who always fought for essential individual rights against government intrusion while arguing people needed to take responsibility for their own actions. While he and his team of conservative thinkers failed to restrain growth of government and government's intrusion into our lives, he and his people at National Review educated several generations of people in media and politics about faith-based conservative and libertarian thought. I pray for a world where William F. Buckley Jr. and all he trained continue to sally forth and take on the ideological opposition. Bill Buckley liked the fight, waged a long fight, we’ll miss him dearly, but we’ve got to carry his torch. Bill Buckley is gone. Requiesat in pace. Riposi in pace.